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Home to one of the largest free information databases online, ibiblio.org has something for everyone. Visitors can browse through our eclectic collections catalog and contributors can host and share their unique collections with millions worldwide.

ibiblio celebrates 2011 World IPv6 day

ibiblio is happy to participate in 2011 World IPv6 day. A small but diverse set of content is now accessible via IPv6. You can view the ibiblio homepage, listen to live radio streams, or sync your local Fedora Linux mirror with rsync over IPv6. The ibiblio IPv6 services page has details on how to connect.

Adoption of IPv6 has been very slow. The Internet Society lists only 434 registered 2011 World IPv6 day participants. However, events such as this give us an opportunity to explore and learn. Read on if you’re interested in some of the hurdles we encountered setting up IPv6 services.

DNS

ibiblio’s DNS is handled by the UNC name servers. Forward lookups for IPv6 are simple as long as the DNS servers support AAAA records (most DNS servers do). The reverse zones took longer to set up. First, we needed to sort out zone delegation from UNC’s ISP. Second, 32 reversed hex characters is enough to test anyone’s patience.

Live audio

ibiblio uses Icecast on Linux to broadcast live audio streams. (I just checked, and the Icecast web site is sadly not available via IPv6.) We have a basic server setup, and the software supports IPv6. This one was easy. Going IPv6-only would be difficult, though. The encoded source streams come to the Icecast server via ipv4.

Fedora Linux rsync repository

This was another easy job. We just turned on IPv6 support in Linux, assigned an address, added a AAAA record. Done.

www.ibiblio.org

Making the ibiblio homepage and CMS work over IPv6 was a challenge. Adding the AAAA record was simple. However, several pages had external objects, such as images and javascript. We fixed the image references by hosting them locally. The biggest hurdle was (and could still be a problem if you’re viewing this over IPv6) is Google Analytics. Google supports IPv6, but you have to jump through hurdles to make it work. The gap is in client-side DNS resolution, so there’s nothing we can do on the server end. Our IPv6 services page has more information.